How Illiteracy Became a Problem (And Literacy Stopped Being One)

Abstract

In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the conjunction of fairly widespread literacy with a new radical political discourse produced a powerful cultural movement in England. In responding to it, the ruling bloc devised new modes of ideological intervention which had significant effects on the shape of the emerging state apparatus. By the time Forster's Education Act was introduced in 1870, the political “problem” had been redefined in terms of the illiteracy, deficient language, and debased tastes of working-class pupils. This history raises questions about the conceptualization of hegemony and resistance in the sociology of education.